Archive | September 2017

Rabbit Hole

Sep10

My Giraffe (Zebra) Call is open!

Written to kelkyag‘s prompt.

🐇

At forty, Gemma considered herself to be relatively practical.

She’d put aside the ridiculousness of her teens and the experimentation of her twenties.  She had staid hobbies and a staid job and, to be quite honest, staid clothes.  She had a very comfortable, safe, secure rut.

So when she was raking leaves and a rabbit in a waistcoat ran by, she shook her head and went back to the leaves.  They had to get raked, after all, or the grass would die and she’d just have more work in the long run…

Then it ran back in the other direction, followed by a coyote in a suitcoat and what she was fairly certain was a red fox in a Queen’s Guard hat and jacket, and Gemma just had to follow.

It wasn’t like she believed it, she told herself, it was just that this was far too strange for her to not look into.  After all, that was her yard, and her – where did they go?  She stopped short, just as the rabbit ran past her one more time.

“Damnit,” she muttered, and hurried after the creature, which was definitely wearing a waistcoat.  And now she, too, was being chased by a fox and a coyote, who, like the rabbit, come to think of it, were rather large for their species, at least as she understood it.

“I moved to the suburbs to get away from – oooohh shit.”  

She was falling, falling, and as she thought this hole should not be big enough for me, the hole seemed to enlargen.  She passed what looked like a picture-perfect 1950’s bomb shelter, except that she could see right into it.  She passed through what loked like a large underground swimming pool, except she didn’t get wet at all.  And then a library, the biggest library she’d ever seen.

She was falling quite slowly, she realized, and none of the animals were anywhere to be seen.

I’ve fallen and hit my head, she thought, I’m going to bleed out in my back yard.  Wake up, Gemma, damnit, Wake Up!

At the second wake up, she came to a stop.  Not awake, not in the least, but she was standing on solid ground in what looked like someone’s living room.

No.  Not someone’s.  It looked like what hers might have looked like when it was new, if it had been a 1920’s Display Home at the time, except that the doors were missing.  No… no, there was the front door, smaller than the cat door she had in it now.  And there was the door to the kitchen, even smaller.

On the quaint occasional table was a piece of cake and a cordial full of blue liquid.  The cake had a sign next to it that said, in tidy if spidery handwriting, Eat me; and the cordial was labelled, as one might expect, Drink me.

Gemma sat down on the floor and swore.


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Falling Out Of The Noose

Sep8

This story is part of the Addergoole: The Original Series backstory/Sidestory

It comes after Loose Ends and Tying Off; if you are following Addergoole: a Ghost Story, Shad and Meesh are Abednego’s older brothers, Eris and Joff’s former Keepers, and all around bad guys.

It is written to chanter_greenie‘s prompt.

🔒

Shadrach had last track of how many times they’d gone through this.  Keeper, Kept, Keeper, Kept.  They went through whole months where they were both as gentle as they knew how, hoping the next month would be kind back to them.  They went through seasons where they were rough, violent, nasty.  He’d almost died at least four times.  He’d almost killed Meshach at least twice.

Once, Professor VanderLinden, Professor Solomon, and Professor Pelletier had taken turns living with them for two months.  It had made those two months very tense, but it hadn’t fixed anything. Continue reading →

The Seasons Turn?

Sep8
My Giraffe (Zebra) Call Is Open!

Written to lilfluff‘s prompt.  Definitely a beginning.  

🍁

“I don’t see why I should step down.  Everyone knows Winter is evil.”

There were four seasons and four courts.  There had always been, as long as the words went back and before that as long as the stories passed, four seasons and four courts.

“He’s not evil, he’s simply… still.”  Spring was not known for being the most eloquent of seasons.  Hers was the time of bubbly abundance and joy, not of long eloquent speeches.  “Besides, you have to give up the throne and the crown.  Who knows what will happen if you don’t?”

“Nothing will happen.”  Autumn was impatient, at times, harsh at others, and right now, stubborn.  They were, of course, people, people wearing hereditary crowns, and as such they had their own personalities and their own quirks, but there was a certain amount of folklore attached to each of the crowns and to the great throne, and there were some that said that the crown and the throne became the people as much as the people became the crown.  “That is a silly myth.  We’re people.  This is a tradition.  The movement of the sun in the sky is not swayed by who sits on the throne.  It just means that we cut Winter out.”

“What if it is, though?”  Summer was sleepy, but he leaned against a post and studied the two women who bracketed him.  “What if you cut Winter out and… winter doesn’t come?”

“Then it’s not cold?” Spring offered.  “Things don’t freeze… oh  Spring isn’t special anymore.”

“-seeds that need the frost to crack don’t crack.  Animals don’t know if they should hibernate or not.  People don’t rest.”  Summer raised his eyebrows.  “Spring, if she doesn’t let Winter take his seat, who is to say she’ll let you take yours?  And if the world doesn’t grow…”

“Oh, come on, Summer.”  Autumn glared at him.  “You’re being ridiculous!  It’s a myth!  In our grandparents’ time, there was a whole two years where we had no Summer King!  Autumn and Spring split it up between them while they waited for a new Summer to come of age!”

“And, as I recall, those were very chilly summers, weren’t they?”  He yawned.  “It’s up to you two.  Winter doesn’t like me, he doesn’t talk to me, and he won’t fuck me.  If you want to split his throne up between you, that’s your business.  If it breaks the world- then it becomes my business.”

“Wait, who said anything about splitting it?” Autumn glared at the lanky ginger king.  “Like I said, I’m not giving up the throne!  He’s crazy!”

“Crazy now?”  Spring frowned across the room.  “I thought he was evil.  And – come on, Autumn, splitting it would only be fair…”

“Both of you!” Autumn flung up her hands in frustration.  “I’m going to talk to Winter!  At least he makes sense!”

“Makes sense about… you taking his throne…?”  Spring’s confused whisper followed the Autumn queen out of the throne room.


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Turning Leaves

Sep8
My Giraffe (Zebra) Call is open!

Written to rix_scaedu‘s prompt.  

🍁

The leaves were turning wrong.

When you lived in a wooded area for a while, you got so you could feel the rhythm of autumn. The leaves closest to the road, closest to the prevailing wind, closest to anything that chilled them down, turned first.  The biggest trees turned slower.  The middle of the woods turned slow and last.

But in the forest behind Erato’s house, there was an almost circular place where the leaves had starting turning quickly, almost before the little maple that faced the wind all alone to the west of her house.   Continue reading →

Giraffe (Zebra) Call Day Two: Prompt Away

Sep8

Good morning everyone!

(or good afternoon, good evening, good night)

It’s Day Two of my Giraffe (Zebra) Call, and it’s looking to be a good one!

Check out the Call for prompts, read the stories I’ve already posted, and, if you haven’t left a prompt, go and leave some.

I’ll be here, writing about falling leaves 😀 Continue reading →

Down to Talen Hall

Sep8

My Giraffe (Zebra) Call is open!

Written to clare_dragonfly‘s prompt.  It wandered a bit from the prompt…

“Talen” is an homage to someone who will likely never read this…  And obviously the poem/song in this is an homage to 

O I forbid you, maidens all, 
That wear gold in your hair,
To come or go by Carterhaugh,
For young Tam Lin is there.

🌕

Do not go by the TalenHall
Where ruined Talen’s Holdings Lie
Continue reading →

Catalog People

Sep7

My Giraffe (Zebra) Call is open!

Written to ysabetwordsmith‘s prompt.

🛋️

Every payday, Edrio very carefully opened the Sears catalog and very carefully placed an order.

It wasn’t always Sears; it wasn’t always a catalog.  Sometimes it was Penney’s, although their catalog wasn’t as good, or the furniture store, or the hardware store for some paint or some molding.

But it was always payday, and it was always a very considered purchase.

Edrio’s house wasn’t all that large.  It was the smallest house that had been for sale, as a matter of fact, and he’d gotten a very good deal on it because it was old, un-updated, and a one-bedroom.  The Cape Cod house had last been updated in the 50’s, if the wallpaper was any indication.

The wallpaper was the first to go, the carpet, the trim.  Everything was carefully replaced, everything chosen from the catalog spreads or the display lay-outs in the stores, the colors from Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens or color-matched to a Sears spread.  The effect, were anyone to walk into his house, was slightly like being inside a catalog.

In the bathroom it was the most obvious, the small room showing the carefully-coordinated shower curtain and drapes, towels and garbage can and rug.  His bedroom showed the only signs of personality, a stack of battered paper-backs in between leather-covered Barnes and Noble books on a display shelf. His closet was much the same, outfits picked from the pages of the catalogs, bought and worn as exact to those pictures as possible.

The catalog purchases covered over strangeness, of course – the circle of glyphs under the living room rug and the other one in the bathroom, the tone-on-tone runes on the carefully-picked out molding, some to keep monsters in, some to keep them out.  But mostly, they were to cover over Edrio.

At night, he would lie in bed, as he had since he was a child, flipping through the pages of an ancient Sears catalog.  “This is real,” he’d tell himself, in a ritual as battered and as old as the pages.  “This is how real people live.”


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Giraffe-Zebra Linkback Story

Sep7

Leave a comment here if you’ve signal boosted my Giraffe (Zebra) Call !

Each signal boost will get another 100 words.

Ysabat: 3, Lilfluff 2, Inspector Caracal 2, Rix_scaedu 1 – currently posted. 

🍁

It was the first day of the Faire, and it was, as luck would have it, a rainy day, chilly, and thus mostly attended by the locals, the die-hards, and people who had planned their vacation around this fest and were going to enjoy it, damnit, come hell or high water (both of which seemed possible).

Autumn was hawking her wares as best she could – she paid rent on the booth whether business was fair or foul – and entertaining herself by offering free body doodles to anyone who bought a piece of art, however small.  It just so happened those doodles drew with them a little bit of magic.

🍂

The first patron to buy something was a skinny boy in goth-and-bondage street clothes.  He did an awkward turn at Shakespearean english as he asked if her she would draw the skulle of deathhe most foulle on his hand.

“But is death-thu so foul-leh?” she mused, “for you who invites his appearance?”

She was rewarded with a surprised look that said you’re not supposed to notice that and a little smile when she just lifted her eyebrows at him.

She sketched him a realistic skull, one tooth chipped just where his had clearly run afoul of something, and twisted in with walnut ink a line of show me, just to see where his skulle of deathhe took him.

💀

There wasn’t such a crowd that she couldn’t see him moving, just by the strands he trailed .  There were some bright ones , for someone wrapped in so much darkness, shiny lines of hope and one tenuous thing like a crush.  The skull-leh let her see the way he was reaching, grasping for something.  Did he think he’d find it at Faire?  Did he think he’d find them at Faire?  Most grasping like that was for someone, for some emotion, for –

his strands lit up at the archery stand, and Autumn found herself grinning.

🍁

Her second paying customer was a woman maybe twice Autumn’s age, in such absolutely perfect early-Elizabethan garb that she had to have sewn it herself. She bought one of the bigger originals, asking Autumn to hold on to it until the end of the day, and then pushed aside her partlet for Autumn to draw a design on her ample chest.

“Make it a sun,” she offered, “for this day has need of some light.”

“But the light is always with us,” Autumn teased; “it is merely we that cannot see it.”  She drew the sun, heedless of the way the chest jiggled with suppressed laughter.  “There, my lady.  May it warm you.”

“If only that touch of yours does, I shall count myself lucky.”  The lady curtseyed and exited.

☀️

Autumn made herself concentrate, despite a blush she hadn’t been expecting.  Sunshine-lady went the opposite direction from skull-leh boy, heading around the wool vendor with a set of strands that wiggled like a song.  She made friends easily, it looked like, but her connections were light, brushing over people before moving on.  She didn’t touch anyone deeply… oh.

Autumn breathed out in something very much like pain.  She had touched someone deeply once, far too deeply.

The woman slid into a jewelry store while Autumn considered her pens, her heart pounding.

🍂

Her next customer was, he said, looking for something for his girlfriend.  She wasn’t sure why she knew he was lying, but he was definitely not being truthful.

He was tall, blue-eyed, very tan, with sandy blonde hair and a chin so square you could use it to level-and-true buildings.  He settled on a unicorn that had a touch of frustrated need worked into it, an original – some people could tell the difference some couldn’t, but she’d only ever managed to work magic into one print and that one sold like hotcakes – and tried to turn down her body-art offer.

“It doesn’t have to show,” she cajoled, and he asked her for a hammer.

⚒️

Hammers were interesting.  She followed the construction he was trying, watching the strands that didn’t really touch him, even though they wrapped around him.  He was here for a reason.  He was here with people, but had slipped off.  He wasn’t here with a girlfriend, although he was here with a girl.

There were stories she could tell, but the one she could trace in his strands looked like a faire booth:  It had all the parts of a house, but it wasn’t a house.  Walls, floor, roof.

But something was missing.

🍁

Autumn was still puzzling over her third customer when a group of women walked through.

She could tell rental costumes; she could also tell that they were here to have fun and were determined that the weather wasn’t going to stop them.

One of them, a beauty with short-cropped brown hair and startling blue eyes, shyly told Autumn that she would buy every single piece of art that looked like her here, if she could.

Autumn couldn’t help asking her to model, with a little coy grin that usually didn’t offend.  “I think you’d make a lovely dryad?  Or a princess.”  When the girl demurred in a way that said it might not always be a no, Autumn drew the body art she asked for in iridescent green around a slender wrist.

🍃

Leaves.  Had she been inspired by Autumn’s dryad comment?  She watched the girls giggle off out of sight, the dryad-princess’ strands twisting past the echo of the skull-leh boy – still at the archery stand, and still flickering with joy.

She liked her friends.  She had a comfortable group with the nice tight weaving you got front long association.  She was reaching for something, something a little more, a little higher up on the tree.

She really would make a lovely dryad.  Autumn kept an eye on her strands as she called to some passing, umbrella-sheltered guests.

☔

Mad Kings and Handmaidens

Sep7

My Giraffe (Zebra) Call is open!

Written to alexseanchai‘s prompt.

👑

The problem with mad kings wasn’t so much the madness part, Iounia thought, as it was the shifting of the madness.

The only sign she’d had that she’d fallen out of favor with the king was a slight shift in his giggle.  If she hadn’t watched Maia be dispensed with the month before after just such a slight shift – and before that Abri, and before that Martia – she might not have known it was time to leave.  

But Iounia was known for her sharp eyes and her attention to detail, which was what had brought her to the mad king’s attention in the first place, what had sat her at his feet as his adviser, and what had led her to stop by Nueva’s room and suggest quietly that she might want to get while the getting was good.

Nueva made long-term plans.  Nueva was really, really good at long-term plans. Dessie was really good at making do with almost nothing.  Between the three of them – because Nueva’s plan had led to grabbing Dessie on the way out – they had gotten out of the palace without a hitch.  They had gotten out of the city without a hitch.

And now, rather to Iounia’s surprise – although she should have seen it coming – they were planning a rebellion.

“Not exactly a rebellion,” Dessie demurred, as they sat in an abandoned barn, cooking rats over a fire.  “More of a housecleaning.  Let the Mad King keep his crown.  We’re just going to – ah.  Work around him.”

“Why let him keep his crown?” Nueva countered.  “Why not let the crown sit on an empty throne?”

“An empty throne invites someone to sit on it.  A madman on the throne invites people to stay away.”

“Let him give orders.”  Iounia understood the plan now.  “And let him believe his orders have been carried out.  Meanwhile, the rest of the country can get on with – well, with being a country.”

Safe in his underground chamber, surrounded by his crowns, the Mad King never did learn that he had fallen out of favor.


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The Empire Falls; The Emperor Stands

Sep7

My Giraffe (Zebra) Call is open!

Written to @dahob‘s prompt.

🦓

It was the day past the Autumnal Equinox, and the Emperor wasn’t dead.

The Rothenkill Empire, a wide-spanning mass of bureaucrats, generals, courtiers, financiers, farmers, and clerks, waited with their collective breaths held.

The servants of the Emperor moved slowly and carefully, as if their heads might fall off if they went about their tasks too quickly, or if they said the wrong thing.

Everyone was waiting.  Everyone was confused.  And almost everyone was worried.

In the Rothenkill Empire, it was said that the Emperors fell with the leaves.  And, like leaves, it was known that sometimes, the Emperors needed a little push, a helpful shove.

So where was the shove?

“This is nor normal,” complained the Chief Financier in charge of budgets. “What are we going to do?  Someone should do something.”

“Someone has to do something,” complained the Head Bureaucrat in charge of law distribution, re-writing, and deletion.

“Won’t someone do something?” pleaded the General of the Imperial Armies.  “He’s starting to give orders that make sense and can’t be ignored!  What are we going to do if we can’t ignore him?”

The Emperor, snug on his throne, pretended he could hear none of this.  He hadn’t ascended to the Poison Throne by looking or acting particularly bright, after all.  None of his predecessors had, either, not in decades, possibly not in centuries.

“The problem is,” muttered a person serving as a handmaiden, “nobody remembers how.”  Her grandmother had once helped off three emperors in a row, but that had been when you got a class of emperor that sometimes needed a shove.  “And with this one, I’m not going to risk it.”

And the Emperor smiled as the empire – the mass of functionaries that had killed his father, his grandfather, and countless of his various uncles and cousins – began to crumble under its own confusion.